


First Name Terms

by Jen (ConsultingWriters)



Category: James Bond (Movies), James Bond - All Media Types, Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: 00Q - Freeform, Angst, Developing Relationship, Gen, I'm incapable of not writing angst, M/M, Romance, Sexual Content, a dash of fluff, and an AO3 account, my apologies, now with warning due to popular demand, oh god a new ship, relationship, the boys aren't perfect but they try
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-03
Updated: 2012-12-03
Packaged: 2017-11-20 05:37:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/581877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConsultingWriters/pseuds/Jen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bond could count the number of times Q called him by his first name on the fingers of one hand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	First Name Terms

**Author's Note:**

> A relationship. 
> 
> Please, please read the warnings. I put them there for a reason. I've now had abuse over it DESPITE HAVING WARNED, so here I am, reiterating again, to please read the warnings. When I first posted, I didn't understand AO3 very well - I'm used to other sites, where "Major Character Death" doesn't apply as a warning. I completely bypassed it initially. I corrected my mistake within 12 hours, and apologised to those commenters who noted, quite kindly for the most part, that I had missed off a pertinent warning.
> 
> Please don't write abuse, either. We're writers, we're readers. We love fandoms and fanfic. Please don't post abuse.

“You’re late.”

“You’re tetchy,” Bond smirked, gliding into Q-branch. Q was waiting in front of his central workstation, typing frenetically into a keyboard in front of him. He had the air of a super-villain in his revolving chair, infinite lines of code stretching out in front of him across ceiling-high screens.

“My equipment?”

“In the Nile, and on the black market.”

Q’s typing stilled abruptly. He spun around to face Bond, his expression utterly livid. “My office. Now.”

Bond followed like a somewhat less than recalcitrant child, Q in his old-man jumpers and face of a teenager still managing to be mildly frightening in his fury. He shut the door on the rows of slightly smug-looking Q-branch operatives.

“007, this is entirely unacceptable. I have a budget, and very little time, and while yes I have the full design plans and yes I can reconstruct them, I would really rather prefer to not blow half my quarterly budget every time you have a mission,” Q said in a long, furious hiss.

Bond looked at him impassively for a moment. “My apologies,” he said with a soft smile, the type that usually disarmed most angry people.

Q was not even a little bit disarmed. “I will be testing my subdermal trackers on you. Report here at seven tomorrow morning. I would defy even you to damage or lose them, so perhaps it will equate to the first worthy investment I’ve had in you and your supposedly legendary skills.”

“I understand entirely,” Bond said, turning the disarming smile up a notch, and taking a small step towards Q. “I really am sorry.”

Q’s gaze flicked up and down him, brows creasing. “Bond, what are you doing?”

“Call me James,” Bond purred, placing a hand on Q’s.

“Bond will do... are you flirting with me, 007?!”

“And we’ve degenerated to my agent number, how disappointing,” Bond noted with a small laugh.

“I am not some leggy blonde you’re attempting to seduce, nor will you distract me from your utter ineptitude through overly calculated behaviour,” Q snapped at him. “Get out of my office, Bond. I will see you at seven tomorrow. If you’re late, I will make your life unpleasant.”

“Understood,” Bond nodded, stepping back again. He moved towards the door. “Would you be that distressed, if I was flirting?”

“Get out, Bond,” Q said without looking at him, the slightest flush on the back of his neck and creeping to his ears. Bond couldn’t fail to notice, he always noticed.

“Really Q, call me James,” he said, still in his gently coaxing tone.

“Out.”

\---

“You’re late.”

“You’re still working,” Bond noted. It was quite a long way past midnight, and Q had been over the comms to him since six that morning while he completed his mission, blissfully one that had him stationed in the UK. It only happened once in a while, but it was nice to actually be in the same time zone for a mission.

“I have a lot to do,” Q said curtly. The scrabble mug sat by his desk, Q continuing to type far faster than anybody sane could keep track of. “What do you want, 007?”

“I came to return your equipment,” Bond said, with the barest shadow of a smirk. Q’s typing stalled, he swore fluidly at some error Bond would never understand, nearly knocked over the scrabble mug, and spun towards Bond.

“What?”

“Your equipment,” Bond repeated, placing the customised gun, radio transmitter and watch on the desk, brushing Q’s arm as he did so. Q gave the very slightest of shudders at the contact, an atonal sigh.

“Have you had a blow to the head?” Q asked suspiciously, picking up the gun and examining it; it didn’t seem to be irreparably damaged, was actually in surprisingly good shape. “This is unprecedented.”

“You deserved it,” Bond said with a raised eyebrow.

The silence stretched out.

“I should leave really, shouldn’t I?” Bond suggested, when the silence began to get painful. Q was pathetically grateful that there was nobody else in Q-branch to watch his gradual descent into incomprehensible garbling. He was one of the most brilliant employees of MI6, past or present, and yet prolonged exposure to agent 007 seemed to be making him deteriorate.

He therefore took the only option available to him, and tried to get Bond out of his immediate vicinity.

“I have work to do, so if you wouldn’t mind…”

Bond’s fingers brushed against Q’s arm again, very gently. “You’re welcome for the equipment.”

“Yes, of course. Thank you, Bond,” Q murmured, eyes continuing to flick to Bond’s hands. He couldn’t help but wish there could have been something more, and he truly didn’t want to be thinking that, it was impractical and absurd. Bond slid away from Q-branch, as he always did; Q knew he’d see Bond later, for the brief of a mission he only knew about from his constant forays into encoded data.

“It’s still James,” Bond called, without looking back, and Q just laughed without entirely knowing why.

“Alright. Thank you, James,” Q returned, his voice still sliding through laughter. Bond looked back at him, and Q saw the first uncontrived smile he’d ever seen from the agent in all the time they’d worked together.

“A pleasure, Q,” Bond said with a nod of his head, and continued out of Q-branch.

\---

It actually happened in a way neither expected. 

Bond returned from his next mission, and the mission after. The two of them danced around each other a little more, Q bluntly refusing to acknowledge anything in the way of emotion, Bond doing the same but admitting a more basic attraction. The sexual tension was beginning to drive most of MI6 insane.

The mission after that landed Bond in the doghouse after destroying more equipment – Q didn’t speak to him for two weeks – and the next mission was the clincher. Several months had passed, months of Q’s calm voice in Bond’s head, saving his life and berating him quietly, and sighing with easy boredom when he seduced another ‘leggy blonde’.

An explosion rendered Bond off radar and communications. The cleanup team found four bodies, one positively identified as Bond’s, although admittedly in quite a few pieces. No matter what Q attempted, he couldn’t find any evidence that Bond could still be alive. He was reported as dead.

Q’s depression was tangible, and his productivity not even slightly affected, so nobody could say a word. He worked incessantly, stopped smiling, snapped at his subordinates and decided food was a distraction. This lasted for a full three weeks. There was a running poll on how long it would take for Q to simply collapse.

Bond naturally called M when it transpired, as it always did, that he wasn’t actually dead. M told him to get down to Q-branch, and not contact Q beforehand. He detailed Q’s response to his apparent death. “…And I know what you’re like, you haven’t fucked him yet so I’m guessing you actually care this time…”

Bond decided he liked the new M.

He approached Q-branch in the middle of the night, safe in the knowledge that Q would still be there. Bond had literally never been to Q-branch when Q hadn’t been there. The man probably slept in his office, for god’s sake.

Q was in his office, meaning Q-branch itself was eerily empty, given that it was about one in the morning. He slipped past the work desks, tapping on Q’s door; he could hear movement inside, and after a moment heard the familiar voice replying: “Come in.”

He pushed open the door. Q was looking through a magnifying glass contraption into the depths of a hard drive, tweezers in one hand. “One moment,” Q said, placing something minute into said hard drive, lips pursed in concentration.

He looked up. Q looked pretty terrible, actually. Slightly gaunt around the edges, dark circles of tiredness around his eyes. His mouth fell open at the man in the doorway. 

“James,” he breathed, guard down for the slightest of seconds. The mask snapped up again as abruptly as it had vanished. “I thought you were dead.”

“When am I ever?” Bond asked. Q continued to stare at him, wetting his lips slightly, running a hand through his unruly hair in a nervous fashion.

“Do you have any equipment left?” he asked, carefully modulating his voice. Bond took a few steps forward, and placed various pieces of equipment that had once been whole onto the desk. Q nodded, huffing out a small laugh at the state they were in.

Bond walked around to him, leaning over his shoulder, assessing his work on the hard drive despite having no idea what he was doing or how it was done. “Why didn’t you contact?” Q asked, tone business-like, quiet fragility slipping into the final word.

“It took me a little while to get back, and then I thought it would be best to see you in person,” Bond explained, almost plausibly. He placed a hand on Q’s shoulder, thumb rubbing the joint softly. “Q…”

“Please don’t,” Q interjected, voice perfectly steady.

“Don’t what?”

Q shrugged awkwardly, keeping his gaze fixed on the hard drive on his desk as though he was actually thinking about it. Bond shifted, moving both hands to Q’s shoulders, continuing the soft motions that had the unfair effect of draining all the tension from his upper body.

Q didn’t really expect to twist in his chair, grab Bond’s shirt, and tug him down to a kiss.

That was the intention, in any case. In reality, Q twisted, grabbed Bond’s shirt awkwardly, and ripped it when Bond – who was practically twice his weight in sheer muscle – didn’t move with him. 

“I liked that shirt,” Bond commented, with a shadowing laugh. Blushing furiously, Q gathered together the wreckage of his decorum, and retorted:

“I liked my equipment.”

Bond laughed; again, totally uncontrived. He leant down, and placed his lips against Q’s. Q sighed against him, in a way that was surprisingly deliberate from somebody who seemed as naïve as Q and sent throbbing urgency to Bond’s groin.

Bond’s hands tangled in his cardigan, slipping around his shirt collar, Bond dipping to his knees to press himself closer to Q, Q falling forward out of his chair on top of Bond, the pair landing sprawled on the floor of Q’s office, hearts and breath increasing to a frantic pace, desperately pressed against one another as though it was the last moment in the world.

Bond’s hands ranged lower; Q was writhing, nails scratching down Bond’s front in a way that made him gasp. He was surprisingly cunning, apparently working out precisely what Bond liked and repeating it with innovation. That brain was useful for more than algorithms, it appeared.

“We should go,” Q mumbled, as Bond’s lips explored his entire torso and neck, hands everywhere at once.

“I would love to fuck you over your desk though, you know,” Bond rasped in his ear, nibbling on his earlobe in a way that made Q suddenly whine.

“No, no, not here,” Q reiterated as his sanity kicked back in, pushing Bond away from him with notable reluctance and sitting up, trying to flatten his hair. “My flat is nearer.”

“Of course you know that,” Bond laughed, pulling Q up to standing, kissing him against the desk, hands sliding down to cup Q’s incredibly interested crotch. Q batted him away, raising an eyebrow.

“How many times? Not. Here,” Q repeated, looking at himself and realising he wasn’t going to make himself look better in the next couple of seconds. He now needed to get out of Q-branch before anybody saw him, and sprung to immediate conclusions, and he didn’t care how true or not those conclusions were.

Miss Moneypenny smirked at him the next morning as Q strode in full of the joys of spring, and Q decided he simply didn’t give a shit.

\---

There were the infinite beautiful ways Q whispered Bond’s name when they were together, which Bond clusters together in a blur of dark and light and sound. The moments Q abandoned all of their usual work epithets and let himself love James, just James, not Bond, James Bond or agent 007 or any variation thereupon.

Q shouted, breathed, sobbed James’ name. They moved together, in tandem with one another, vision whiting with sheer bliss, clearing to murmur secrets and words that are barely their own, telling stories of people they had once been.

Q tells James his name, and Bond never repeats it. It is Q’s name, his own title, his own secret to use and tell and wield like a weapon only when he wants. It is somebody he has left behind, and Bond knows that, and holds the name close to his heart at a beautiful piece of knowledge Q lent him.

“James,” Q called out in the middle of the night, and Bond curled himself around the beautiful form that he knows better than anybody he has ever known before. The people he may have loved, the people he has lost, do not matter in those moments. 

He is James again, to just one person, and he lives for it.

\---

Bond is on a mission, and it’s not a simple or an easy one. He needs to extract a hard disk from a laptop, and he genuinely isn’t certain of how the hell he’s going to get to it.

The woman is tall and brunette and French and her sexuality is a lethal weapon. Bond has never had a single difficulty in seducing women, and this one is no exception. She is relatively vacuous, but her kiss tastes of tequila and her body hums with desire, and he enjoys her warmth. He has a vague feeling that she can get him access to the laptop, but it’s a poor excuse.

He forgets about his earpiece, a tiny little thing that buries itself in his ear and is easily forgotten. People had stopped speaking several hours ago, when his situation ceased to be quite so precarious. He was probably being monitored, but it wasn’t likely to be with any real interest.

It is when he orgasms, the woman beneath him letting out breathy wails, his own sounds simple grunts and moans, that he hears a voice.

“James,” the voice gasped on a toneless break, barely voiced, easily missed. Bond quite suddenly can’t breathe. The rest of the evening is going through the motions.

James leaves the woman to sleep, lets her slip from his brain when he find the laptop, pulls out the hard drive, and takes it home with him. Q dictates the final stages quite casually, and gets him onto the plane. Bond doesn’t broach the obvious subject until after his debrief; they agreed a long while ago not let their work and personal lives cross over.

He speaks to M, whose gaze is quietly judgemental. Miss Moneypenny actively scolds him, and he snaps at her, because the guilt in his chest is clawing at him like live animals. Q-branch carefully avoids looking at him.

Q is in his office. He looks up, and Bond feels like somebody stabbed him in the heart because it is so obvious, to him at least, that Q is breaking around the edges, and it is entirely his fault.

He places the hard drive on the desk, and steps back. The silence is close to throttling the pair of them.

“How can I help, 007?” Q asks flatly.

“Q, I’m…”

“I have no doubt,” Q interrupts. “Now if you wouldn’t mind, I have a lot of work to do.”

“I’m sorry,” Bond said simply, deciding on balance that a simple apology would be the best idea in this circumstance.

“Again, I have no doubt,” Q tells him. “Please, Bond. Go. There’s nothing to discuss. You sleep with people in the line of work, it’s essentially a pre-requisite for double-oh agents. While I do struggle to see how that was strictly ‘in the line of work’, you successfully completed the mission and nobody died, which is a far better result than usual. We can consider this a success.”

“I didn’t need to sleep with her.”

“By all means, make this easier for me,” Q snapped, before mumbling at his desk: “I don’t know what in the hell I expected.”

“What does that mean?!”

“Get out,” Q shouted at him, his voice suddenly hitching. He let out a snarl of frustration at his own stupidity, the fucking stupid decision of letting him fall into a relationship and into some strange form of love with James fucking Bond.

“I’ll see you tonight,” Bond said, in a tone that brooked no refusal. Q refused to respond, staring at the hard drive Bond deposited on his desk, deciding that he was definitely going to hand it over to one of his subordinates, and in the same thought, remembering that M had requested his specific work on this project.

Bond left. Q wouldn’t come home that evening.

\---

Q returned to the flat a week later, curled himself up in a ball in a bed that smelt of James and slept for fourteen solid hours. He didn’t speak. He showered in the morning, left without looking at the man on the couch who watched with bleak, icy eyes.

When the storm broke, as was inevitable, they argued like hell, both screaming to the extent that the neighbours knocked to check everything was alright. Bond defended his corner which was monumentally stupid, and Q issued horribly hurtful statements that Bond couldn’t quite deny were true.

Bond brought back every piece of equipment Q gave him, almost intact, apologising Q again and again. He didn’t sleep with anybody else, in the line of duty or otherwise. Bond listened to every instruction Q issued while in the field, and waited every night for him to come back, hoping he would.

It took over a month for their relationship to start returning to normal. After three months, it was fine again, and Q murmured James’s name to the darkness and James learned incrementally more about the nameless man who could take over the world in a few deft keystrokes if he so wished.

Somebody like that would always be in danger, that much was quite evident. Thankfully Q-branch was quite well guarded, and Q never went into the field; anything that needed doing could be dictated, and god damn it, Q hated flying.

James was on a mission in Germany, Q speaking quickly into his microphone as he negotiated some very important computer-related moments for Bond, sarcastically returning Bond’s commentary, their work relationship taking on an ease that Bond had never shared with anybody before.

A series of bizarre noises sounded through Bond’s earpiece, half-recognisable, not particularly promising. “Q, is everything alright?” Bond asked, as he darted shadow-like through a corridor.

“Yes, Bond, now concentrate on the job in hand,” Q snapped back. Bond knew Q too well, could feel there was a running tone of anxiety threading through him. Bond returned his attention to the corridor, his gun drawn, briefly aware that he needed to be alive if he wanted to continue pestering Q. He shot the two men guarding the building on Q’s command, and continued to run.

“Steal the car to your left, you may as well,” Q sighed, waving goodbye to his morality. “I’ll have a car for you, your own car, next time.”

“Promises, promises,” Bond grunted, following Q’s instructions to get into the car, setting it running, driving as fast as he could out the building as people continued to try shooting him.

“Alright, drive for half an hour and swap cars,” Q told him. More bizarre noises, including what Bond was relatively certain sounded like an explosion, and a few unmistakable gunshots.

“Q, what in the hell is going on over there?” Bond demanded, flooring the accelerator, certain there was something he was not being told.

“Bond, I’m sorry, I will need to go offline,” Q told him, as there was another crash at the door of his office. He swallowed nervously, eyes flickering up to his door, keeping Bond’s voice in his ear.

“Don’t you dare, Q,” Bond said lividly. “Tell me what is going on, right now.”

“It appears that Q-branch has been breached,” Q said with the barest tremor.

“WHAT?!” Bond bellowed, nearly crashing the car. “Q, Q get the hell out of there right now…”

“They’re outside the door, and regardless of the extensive security I have in place, I have barely a minute left to me,” Q said calmly, tugging at the sleeves of his cardigan. “I would prefer to know you are safe, rather than face my imminent fate.”

“Q, I’m fine, now please, please get out of there…”

The door splintered under impact, and Q saw the mottled light the Q-branch computers cast, spilling into his office. “Oh,” Q sighed, breathing shallowly.

“Q? Q?!”

“Goodbye James,” Q said clearly, in that light tone Bond recognised from the first time they met, that day in the National Gallery where Bond had been mildly insulting and Q had proven Bond’s misconceptions.

The bang of the gun was nothing compared to the claustrophobic silence.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and concrit are always loved. I can only apologise for the ending.


End file.
